Literary Review
Rococo follies
Empty Wigs
Jonathan Meades
(Unbound, £25)
THE veteran Jonathan Meadesfancier will probably have begun to spend time in the great man’s company in the wake of his short story collection Filthy English (brief, wordy, louche), published as long ago as 1984.
He – and invariably it is a he – will doubtless have gone on to exclaim over Meades’s first novel Pompey (longer, wordier, loucher), which hit the shelves in 1993. In the intervening decades Johnny has whomped up a storm with a series of books and TV programmes on what the blurb rather coyly calls “predominantly topographical subjects”. Empty Wigs (longer still, even wordier, yet more louche) may plausibly be regarded as its proud author’s last, late-period assault on Parnassus.